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Archive for the 'International Media' Category

Hina Rabbani Khar, the youngest and first woman to become Minister of Foreign/External Affairs of Pakistan, was just a week into her demanding new job when she travelled to India last week at the head of the Pakistani team participating in the recently resumed dialogue to promote peace between the two not-so-friendly neighbours.

The trick for feminists has long been to keep one eye keenly fixed to the deeper problems afflicting us while letting the other eye see signs of progress. The prickly but familiar dialectical relationship of progress and recalcitrance have left many of us cross-eyed through the years.

If you’ve been boycotting newspapers, magazines, TV news and the blogosphere for the past few weeks, or if terms like “rape,” “slut” or even “sex” lead you to hurriedly put down the newspaper or magazine and turn the TV channel (as they do for my media-savvy grandmother), then you may […]

As a journalist who writes about feminism, gender and sexuality, I have been keenly interested in SlutWalk, a protest against victim-blaming which first took place in Toronto on April 3, after a local police officer said at a safety seminar that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”
I wasn’t […]

The sexual assault and battering to which South African broadcast journalist, Lara Logan, was subjected in Egypt on 11 February generated reports and commentary replete with sexism, racism and Islamophobia…

By Guest Blogger Jenn Ettinger
The Comcast-NBC Universal merger was finalized last week, and its impact on our media environment is likely to be grim. Ultimately, this new giant company will control not just vast amounts content, but how people can access that content via broadcast, cable and the Internet. The result will be fewer voices […]

According to a new study more women are are marrying for money than did in the 1940s.

The author of the report, Dr Catherine Hakim, tells BBC Radio 5 live “there is this myth that women invariably choose to have a relationship of total equality”.

Speaking to Victoria Derbyshire, Dr Hakim continues: “More and more women are choosing to marry men who are substantially better educated than them, and therefore have higher earnings capacity.”

By then I was truly excited about this new research, for all sorts of reasons, and not the least because close to 100 percent of well-educated men in the 1940s had to be marrying “down”, given the gender percentages then prevailing in institutions of higher education. That, in turn must mean that loads more highly educated men are NOT marrying “down” today which, based on Hakim’s arguments, means that men are seeking a more egalitarian relationship than in the past!

Or something like that. It’s as good as Hakim’s arguments, in any case, given that adding-up problem: If a country is fairly egalitarian in education, how can “more and more” women marry “up” compared to, say, 1940s?

But I digress from the purpose of this post which is to tell you that after carefully reading through Hakim’s report, I found no new study. She links to her year book published in 2000 and to a Polish paper from 2007 which is unavailable through Google. But no new study. Where did the BBC get that from?

Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV officially hit bookstores yesterday [!!] and I can’t tell you how excited I am. You know who else is excited about the book? Canadians. To mark the official publication date, let’s take a look at the warm reception Reality Bites Back is getting from the […]